How SchoolKeep Pushed the Content Production Button to Generate Leads

“You helped bring in organic leads who wouldn’t have found us without that article. The content also helped nurture leads who came to us through other sources.”

Becky Krill

Head of Marketing

The Client

SchoolKeep is a modern learning management system for optimizing training operations. Customers use the SchoolKeep LMS to attract better prospects, reduce user onboarding time and increase retention.

The Challenge

SchoolKeep’s goal for B2B marketing content was to increase traffic to and through their website. As their Head of Marketing, Becky Krill, says, “When traffic increases, we convert more people into customers.”

Their main approach to achieving that goal was to develop content that targeted organic search terms and to use the content in promoted social media and email.

SchoolKeep was a growing startup with many marketing activities to manage, including conversion rate optimization for the traffic they did attract. They needed a partner to fuel their lead generation machine with high-quality written content that was ready for publication and in alignment with their strategy.

The Solution

When SchoolKeep partnered with McGuire Editorial to manage an editorial calendar and deliver content, we started by creating a strategy brief. This document captures the client’s goals, audience, messaging and voice and outlines the topics and content formats that would work best with this strategy. We also layered SchoolKeep’s keyword research over that, and we referred to and revisited the brief regularly during the 12-month engagement.

Next we brought writers onto the project, developed a style guide and translated topics into individual assignments. For assets requiring interviews with external comments, we sourced those experts, and we frequently interviewed SchoolKeep’s internal experts to capture their knowledge and unique point of view.

We then provided careful editing to over 80 articles and 4 ebook-style lead magnets, ensuring that SchoolKeep could steadily publish and promote high quality, authoritative content designed to grow their business.

“The solution you provide lets us just push go and produce. It’s like we had somebody in-house to get this done for us until we built our marketing team.”

See what the SchoolKeep resource center looks like now

Results

%

Increased leads

%

Increased traffic

Two Bites at the Apple

This was actually the second engagement between SchoolKeep and McGuire Editorial.

We had worked together earlier on a short project, after which SchoolKeep moved their content production to a full-service digital marketing agency that was providing keyword planning, customer persona research and website optimization. SchoolKeep felt bundling the content development into the same scope of work would be a smoother process.

They found however that content development wasn’t a priority for the full-service agency, and they came back to McGuire Editorial for the project described above.

“While they understood the marketing tech we use,” Krill says, “we didn’t think their writing chops were as good. The primary contact person really got it, but we had very little communication with the writers, and it didn’t feel like a collaborative process. Content felt like a weak piece of their overall offering.”

What it boiled down to was your team’s writing is of a higher quality.

Takeaways

Content feeds other efforts

SchoolKeep had the most success using paid ads on social media platforms to promote the content — a 737% one-year increase in leads from those channels.